Long time

Many times I've asked myself, "What is the point of blogging?" Truth is, I still don't know. The last time I posted here was in December 2009 about my top albums of the decade. It's November 2010 now.

Sometimes it feels like a senseless act. Writing and writing to put up on the web. How much copy gets put up across blogs on a daily basis? Hourly basis? What makes a site worthwhile, and another disposable? I've written for newspapers and magazines, and I still write for a magazine now. (I'll put up the links soon.) Yes, the articles that appear in those also appear online, but there is also the artifact. The physical product we hold in our hands saying, "Yes, an actual piece of critical writing has been published, and no, it's not mindless bloggerbabble."

Reading and writing is an intimate act. Without speaking, we each decided that I will be writing and you will be reading and hopefully commenting. That's the contract between us. I write for you and for me, you read for you and for me. We agree that we need each other to achieve what we want of this endeavor. For me, blogging has seldom lent itself to fulfilling that contract. That's really why I haven't written in this blog at all lately. I'm not trying to get anybody to agree with my reasoning or to care. I just wanted to put it out there.

I've gone through phases of intense devotion to the blog, to full-fledged "who gives a fuck?" I don't know if anything will ever "come of this," whatever that is supposed to mean. But I do know that I need to write all the time, whether it is good writing or not is not really up to me to decide. I just know that I need writing to work out incongruous ideas, of settling disputes with and within myself, to think about the arts and music mostly in critical ways. Worthwhile or not, it doesn't feel write not to do it.